Microsoft, HTC use Windows Phone's Cortana to poke fun at Apple's iPhone in new ad

A new television spot from Microsoft's Windows Phone division again puts Siri on the iPhone 5s up against Cortana on an HTC One M8, though the video slants more toward a hardware comparison than Microsoft's previous Siri-focued efforts.

The iPhone is first shown turning from side-to-side and admiring itself in a mirror, with Siri reciting the famous "I Feel Pretty" song from West Side Story. In a stilted voice, Siri then greets Cortana and —following Cortana's introduction of the HTC handset —says that she is "more than just a pretty face."

Interestingly, Microsoft does not seem to have used Cortana's actual speech generation for the narration, as they have in previous spots. Instead, a human voiceover artist appears to have been used to exaggerate the comparison.

The ad goes on to tout Cortana's ability to proactively alert users to heavy traffic in advance of an appointment before showing off the One M8's dual-speaker configuration.

"Oh, I only have one. And I'm sitting on it," Siri replies.

Apple's competition has increasingly employed direct head-to-head comparisons in recent years in an attempt to break the company's stranglehold on the smartphone and tablet markets. South Korean firm Samsung is the most notorious offender, recently releasing a video that purportedly asked everyday New Yorkers whether they would prefer an iPad or a Samsung Galaxy Tab S —the Galaxy, predictably, won out.